twentysomethings are interested in the problems of twentysomethings.
Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
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Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#32It's hard to design and create software for subjects you don't know much about. It's not really a surprise that people create software for their own lives. A lot of open source is focused on programming languages, libraries and things to help you code. It's what most open source people know, and thus what they create. I wonder if it would have been better for CS to have been only offered as a minor or double-major to…
Domain knowledge is important; however, even more important is domain experience. With domain experience, you learn where the bottlenecks and pain points are in your workflows.
During my time as an interest rate risk analyst, I had the displeasure of working with a horrible piece of software. It crashed at the most inopportune times, usually near the end of a run. Considering that one run could be on the order of a few hours, you could lose a significant portion of your computing time, something in short-supply when other business processes don't get you your input until seven to ten business days within a new monthly reporting cycle. When it did finish, the probability that there was a problem with the final output was much larger than it should have been. Furthermore, the software could not even be used for actually analyzing your results. You still needed to dump out the calculations to Excel before finishing your analysis.
On the surface, it would seem that the hardest part of solving this problem would be implementing the software as it's a highly specialized area of finance with lots of mathematics. When you break it down, however, what needs to be done on the software side is pretty straightforward.
I had to document this stuff for regulatory purposes at my old job. To document this stuff, I had to do a lot of "reverse engineering" of this software, basically building in Excel the same calculations performed by the software. If any person or group of people near Mountain View are looking for a problem to solve, I'd gladly sit down with you one evening and answer questions about this space.
Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#33It's hard to design and create software for subjects you don't know much about. It's not really a surprise that people create software for their own lives. A lot of open source is focused on programming languages, libraries and things to help you code. It's what most open source people know, and thus what they create. I wonder if it would have been better for CS to have been only offered as a minor or double-major to…
I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why "design" has become such a big fad these days - it's al…
You characterize the situation very well.
It reminds me of the parody of the academic left in sci fi such as the novels of Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. And the parodies of religion and philosophy are even worse.
It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that much of academia is simultaneously incoherent and pretentious, and full of deep insights.
Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#34"[Packer]’s clearly onto something in the way the experience of continuously solving seemingly insoluble technical problems can lead the technocracy to dismiss the challenges of actual societies or, worse, decide they’re simply above them."
This rings true for a number of issues in San Francisco. Let's underfund our public transportation and make taxis inefficient and hard to find -- we'll let the free market solve those problems! Corporate shuttles and a thousand taxi hailing apps will make up the difference.
Except they don't. I can't take a corporate shuttle to buy groceries or go out at night, and the cab situation in San Francisco is embarrassing. How do people here think they're living in the future when they can't even run basic infrastructure?
You can order food or hail a cab with your phone in any city. I only know of one city where idiots who will tell you this is revolutionary.
Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#35I would say yes, it is biased towards twentysomethings because
1) they have disposable income and more easily part with it, and
2) they are more likely to create a tech solution (and surrounding business) to a problem they are familiar with.
Disclosure: I'm in my 30s but had similar wide-eyed dreams in my 20s of creating some big piece of tech that would net me millions.
Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#36That's not true, every time a founder becomes a parent they build shitty solutions to all those problems too :) But seriously this whole angle frustrates me. Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. Why does it always read like "they alone inherited the problems of the universe, and are choosing to build dickpic apps instead". Ev…
Silicon Valley is often quite pleased with itself, and there's more than one "Ignore the complexities of your problem, what would solve this is five guys in San Francisco and a hackathon!" article drifting around out there.
I suspect that's what gets things laid on the shoulders of SV. If its teeming with smart, driven, visionary people with Yankee Know-How and a Can Do Attitude (tm), surely they can do something genuinely spectacular, instead of just inventing a clever way to order pizza.
Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#37If so, it's probably only because young adults are more likely to use the internet and therefore have problems that can be solved by the internet. The internet can't really fix your problems if you don't use it in the first place. Or maybe it could, but you will never know better.
But why is "startup" synonymous with "consumer internet startup"?
We are software people, we solve problems with software - not just with the internet, and not just for the mass public.
Today was the launch day of the bike-sharing program in NYC and I've taken a few bikes out for a spin. The whole system is plugged into a (supposedly) impressive backend that will allow the city to gain an unprecedented insight into cycling patterns and drive the future of not only bike sharing but also cycling infrastructure development in general.
Why is it that when we think "startup" we don't think about problems like this, and instead we only think about mass market consumer internet applications used exclusively by young adults?
We solve problems with software. The fact that we've pigeonholed Silicon Valley into strictly solving end-user-young-adult-internet problems is our fault.
Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#38That's not true, every time a founder becomes a parent they build shitty solutions to all those problems too :) But seriously this whole angle frustrates me. Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. Why does it always read like "they alone inherited the problems of the universe, and are choosing to build dickpic apps instead". Ev…
> Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. It would appear that Silicon Valley did. Every mundane piece of software is going to 'change the world.' People are just waiting for that to happen.
A recent example of that: Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen just wrote a new-agey sort of book explicitly taking that "we're here to change the world" angle.
They could've written a different book, more like one Warren Buffet might write, about the business of software and online services, and running a profitable company in the industry. But they don't appear to consider that to be the bar for success.
Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#39I think software tends to favor the young. In general the biggest companies in tech were founded by younger people. Google - Founded by 20 somethings Apple - Founded by 20 something Facebook - Founder by 20 something Amazon - Founded by 20 something So they solve problems for a younger generation.
The problem with this is they are not run by 20-somethings now. If they were working on 20-something problems because they were 20-somethings, why haven't they moved on? Also, I wouldn't categorize Amazon as solving problems for a younger generation.
A lot of the problems these companies cover are interesting to everyone. Search is interesting to everyone, maintaining a social network is interesting to everyone, buying stuff online is interesting to everyone.
Cab-sharing is not interesting to everyone. Staying in strangers' homes instead of a hotel isn't interesting to everyone. Taking photos of your meals and sharing it with friends is not interesting to everyone.
Re: Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. It would appear that Silicon Valley did. Every mundane piece of software is going to 'change the world.' People are just waiting for that to happen.
A recent example of that: Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen just wrote a new-agey sort of book explicitly taking that "we're here to change the world" angle. They could've written a different book, more like one Warren Buffet might write, about the business of software and online services, and running a profitable company in the industry. But they don't appear to consider that to be the bar for success.
At least some of Google's work has the possibility of changing the world: AI. Between self driving cars, natural interface methods, and data understanding, the future looks interesting.
On the other hand, yet another social network, photoshop filter app, todo list app, instant messaging app, advertising app, these are not going to change the world, though often heralded as such.